Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? – William O. Douglas

Immigrant and radical conservative Neil Munro was clearly acting like a heckler, not a reporter. of course that makes him the far Right’s new hero. Conservatism is something of a cult of hero-worship. They invent them regularly. In his best imitation of the late Andrew Brietbart, having been slapped down by President Obama with admirable restraint at that, Munro skunked off off like a petulant child who had been scolded for flinging mashed potatoes at the dinner table. The Right’s reaction has generally been either to cheer on this knid of bratty behavior or to timidly condemn it. Neil Munro bad, media worse, say conservative bloggers at RightOnline

“I found it embarrassing. I like the Daily Caller, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to interrupt the president during a speech,” said Jon Fleischman, who writes the FlashReport on California politics. “It diminishes the stature of the office of the president of the United States, and Obama does that well enough for himself.”

One assumes Fleishman voted for the worse president in history twice and is ready to vote for a continuation of Bush 43 with the election of Mittens.

At the same time that they disagreed with the way Munro acted, conservative bloggers gathered at the Venetian Hotel here said the question was legit and needed to be asked.

“The fact that he would interrupt the president, I don’t agree with that. But the question needed to be asked. I commend him for [asking that question], but his timing might have been a little off,” said Jim Hoft, who writes GatewayPundit.

Munro’s moronic question was “Why’d you favor foreigners over Americans?” in regards president Obama executive order to halt deportation of illegal immigrants attending college – those brought here as children by their parents. For all intent and purposes they are Americans. They and their parents have worked, paid taxes and purchase goods and services that fuel the economy. Only in the twisted thinking of a conservative is being fair and humane to these people showing some kind of bias for “foreigners”. If Munro has no genuinely inkling of what constitutes obnoxious and stupid behavior he needs to return home and have his parents re-raise him with some sense of decency and honor. The question assumes without presenting facts. An old conservative mental glitch that shows no signs of weaning. Mike Huckabee ( who Ann Coulter once called the Republican Jimmy Carter) defends Obama’s decision while throwing in an absurd objection to the ‘way’ it is going to be implemented :

Dave Briggs came back to the policy rather than the way it was implemented, asking whether it was a “job-killer,” which Huckabee said was “not necessarily” the case, since the people affected are educated in the United States, many of them proven very intelligent. “You don’t punish a kid for what his or her parents did,” adding that this stance “makes me very unpopular with a lot of Republicans.” Alisyn Camerota noted he was not alone among Republicans, either, with Sen. Marco Rubio and John McCain pushing modified versions of the act.

“This isn’t amnesty,” Huckabee explained, but a “pathway to become legal” for people for whom “it doesnt make sense to throw you out because you’ve done well.”

What’s up with the we kinda approve of the decision, but do not like the way it was implemented via executive order or it is unconstitutional for Presidents to make such decisions about laws governing how immigration policy is handled. As is usually the case when conservative Republicans start yammering about what presidents can do and the constitution, they’re either lying, clueless or being contentious assclowns: 10-19-2007, US Army Lures Foreigners with Promise of Citizenship

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the United States has granted US citizenship to 32,500 foreign soldiers. In July 2002, US President George W. Bush issued an executive order to expand existing legislation to offer a fast track to citizenship to foreigners who agree to fight for the US Armed Forces. About 8,000 non-Americans have joined the US military every year since then.

The foreigners already represent 5 percent of all recruits. They even make up the majority of soldiers from some New York and Los Angeles neighborhoods. Four years and 3,800 US deaths after the beginning of the Iraq campaign, fewer and fewer American citizens are willing to fight in a war opposed by a majority of the US population. But despite the Iraq war’s lack of popularity, US generals are demanding 180,000 new recruits a year.

The Pentagon already spends $3.2 billion a year on recruitment, even sending its recruiters to high schools to persuade 17-year-olds still a year away from graduation to enlist.

The US military learned long ago that foreign recruits are often the most dedicated Americans.

An executive order that left Congress out. An executive order in which a president decided immigration policy without a change in the law. How can that be. Remember John Yoo, the Bush administration lawyer who made the Unitary Executive argument that if the president does it, whatever it is, it is legal. Without a shred of hypocritical shame he writes in the National Review – that also supported and defended Yoo’s Unitary Executive Theory – Executive Overreach, June 15, 2012 8:26 P.M.

President Obama’s claim that he can refuse to deport 800,000 aliens here in the country illegally illustrates the unprecedented stretching of the Constitution and the rule of law. He is laying claim to presidential power that goes even beyond that claimed by the Bush administration, in which I served. There is a world of difference in refusing to enforce laws that violate the Constitution (Bush) and refusing to enforce laws because of disagreements over policy (Obama).

See directly contradictory evidence that Bush did the same thing to furnish troops to fight in Iraq by way of a kind of amnesty program. What the Bush administration did do – and Yoo tacitly admits – is ignore what they thought was unconstitutional in conducting the infamous “war of terror”- like adhere to the Geneva Convention, of which the U.S. is a signatory and thus binding law. What Bush and Yoo were supposed to do in that case was challenge the status or constitutionality of our legal obligations to the SCOTUS, but Yoo and Bush never had the courage or moral character to do so. They simply ignored the law. There was one case that made it to SCOTUS that would serve as a rebuke to the Bush-Cheney-Yoo circle jerk of constitutional make-believe, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. A conservative SCOTUS said in the Hamdi decision that no, contrary to Yoo’s maniacal claims, Bush was not king.

The antics of Munro also brought up the subject of the media not doing its job – this is the most secretive president, where’s the transparency, the usual faux outrage by people in perpetual outrage mode over nonexistent issues or issues they have pumped full of hot air. President Obama has not been perfect, but in some ways his administration has been remarkably open compared to the Bush administration. Except in one area, national security related secrecy and executive power. January 22, 2009 – Obama’s First Executive Order Strikes a Blow for Transparency and the Rule of Law

In a world where political symbols matter, President Barack Obama chose a worthy subject for the first executive order of his new administration.

His first executive order, entitled “Presidential Records,” revokes Executive Order 13,233, President George W. Bush’s constitutionally lunatic procedure for enabling former Presidents and Vice Presidents to limit public access to their records. The obscurity of the subject does not diminish the importance of what the new President is signaling.

The government also has made an effort to curb the number of government employees with “original classification authority,” or the ability to classify documents as top secret, secret or confidential. In 2008, there were 4,109 federal workers with this status. By 2009, the number had shrunk to 2,557 — the lowest since 1993. Even so, derivative classifications, or classified documents that can be changed or mutated, soared 135 percent in 2009, mainly because classified e-mail messages were included for the first time.

Finally, the administration reduced the number of backlogged requests by 40 percent in 2009, processing 55,000 more requests than it received in the fiscal year of 2009. Most of this drop is due to the Department of Homeland Security, which had 74,879 backlogs in 2008, but just 18,918 by the next year. Some of these backlogs are quite old; the longest pending request in 2009 was 18 years.

However, the administration has run into trouble with closed meetings, declining declassifications and a $75 billion National Intelligence Budget.

Conservatives and much of the public for that matter has a short memory about what happened two months ago much less scandals that happened four or more years ago. The Bush administration was not only one of the most secretive, but disseminated propaganda to the public under the gaze of real news, March 15, 2005, White House Defends Video News Releases.

The White House on Monday defended the administration’s use of video news releases that are sent to television stations across the country and frequently used without any acknowledgment of the government’s role in their production.

In an opinion last week, the Justice Department concluded that the practice was appropriate as long as the videos presented factual information about government programs. The memo was sent to heads of federal departments and agencies.

[ ]….The advice conflicts with the opinion of the Government Accountability Office, which is the investigative arm of Congress. The GAO says that video news releases amount to illegal “covert propaganda” when they fail to make plain that the government is behind the releases.

Democratic Sens. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey criticized the Justice Department’s memo and asked Bush to order that it be rescinded.

“It is wrong to deceive the public with the creation of a phony news story,” the lawmakers wrote. “It is also illegal.”

There was also the Armstrong Williams scandal, No pundit left behind - After Armstrong Williams pocketed $240,000 from the Department of Education, he conducted a flattering interview with Education Secretary Rod Paige for Sinclair Broadcasting.

Sinclair Broadcasting made headlines last year by aligning itself with partisan, conservative forces and pushing a political agenda. In May, the media conglomerate refused to air “Nightline” when Ted Koppel read aloud the names of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. (Antiwar propaganda, Sinclair executives claimed.) Then, in late fall, Sinclair pushed forward a one-sided, anti-John Kerry documentary on the eve of the election. In both cases, while ignoring charges of bias, Sinclair bosses seemed to relish their time in the spotlight.

But now Sinclair is getting burned by one of its conservative stars and the media company is running for the shadows. In the wake of news that its on-air mainstay, conservative talk-show host and syndicated columnist Armstrong Williams, pocketed $240,000 from the Department of Education in exchange for hyping a White House education initiative, Sinclair is going out of its way to distance itself from its prime-time pundit.

Conservatives will always consider the media librul as long as the media does not push far Right talking points 24/7. That is how they define bias. If it’s not conservative Republican produced propaganda, it’s not news. The media are not scrutinizing President Obama hard enough? The media let Bush and Republicans skate for eight years, Lapdogs to the end?

I’m thinking about the way Bush essentially walked away from press conferences during his first term (holding just 14 compared with Clinton’s 44); the way former chief of staff Andy Card famously dismissed the press as just another D.C. special interest group seeking access; the way the White House for years waved into press briefings a former $200-an-hour male escort with no journalism background and no serious press affiliation; the way Bush/Cheney declared war on The New York Times, using the newspaper as a campaign issue in the 2004 campaign; the way the administration churned out misleading video news releases that crossed the legal line into “covert propaganda”; and the way the administration audaciously paid off pundits like Armstrong Williams to secretly hype White House initiatives.

“Republicans have a clear, agreed-upon plan how to diminish the mainstream press,” is how Ron Suskind, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who was granted unique access inside the White House to report on the administration’s communication strategy, once summed up the situation. “For them, essentially the way to handle the press is the same as how to handle the federal government; you starve the beast. When it’s in a weakened and undernourished condition, then you’re able to effect a variety of subtle partisan and political attacks.”

[ ]…How is any of this surprising? There has been no camouflaging Bush’s strong feeling of contempt for the press, so why do journalists act disappointed when his derision radiates? For instance, it was a small detail but did you notice in Robert Draper’s new book, Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush (Free Press), that when a staffer apologized for interrupting a rare Oval Office print interview Bush was giving Draper, Bush was quick to respond, “It’s okay. This is worthless, anyway.”

There was the time Bush needled a White House reporter for wearing sunglasses while asking a question at a Rose Garden press conference. (The reporter is legally blind.) Then last summer, when the White House press room was closed in order to make some much-needed renovations, Bush made a rare appearance in the room where he “insult[ed] pretty much everyone in spitting distance,” according to Dan Froomkin on Washingtonpost.com. Bush mocked reporters’ make-up, he called one a “crackpot,” and he derided ABC’s veteran reporter Sam Donaldson as a has-been. The assembled press corps loved it, basking in the attention, as well as the insults.

[ ]…Oddly enough, reporters left out what was perhaps the White House’s most egregious example of that pattern, which came on July 2. With most of the White House press corps heavy hitters up in Kennebunkport, Maine, to cover Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit there, Bush that afternoon left the assembled press and flew back to the White House, where he quickly announced he was commuting the sentence of his former aide, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who had been convicted of perjury and obstructing justice in the Valerie Plame leak investigation.

Not only was the news a political blockbuster, and not only did it leave the White House press corps “scrambling” to cover the story from Maine, as ABC’s Martha Raddatz put it that evening, but the announcement involved a high-profile legal case that had ensnared scores of journalists, some of whom were forced to testify in court. Meaning, the press was part of the Libby story. And yet Bush, in a classic F-U gesture, purposefully ditched White House reporters and made the Libby announcement without them present.

Was the press upset? Did journalists raise a ruckus after being snubbed? Hardly. According to one Wall Street Journal reporter, the White House’s chronic pattern of travel deception has “become a running joke among reporters.”

When conservatives lead the press around like a dog with a tight collar the press eats it up. One of the reason is that they had such close relations with Bush White sources. If the press started calling Bush and Company on their distortions, lies and lack of truthiness, they were shut out of the loop. Obama is was not and is not an insider. The press has shown they have nothing to lose by having a double standard, by holding Obama up to much higher standards than Bush. This is the hidden Democratic tax. Small controversies involving Democrats become mountains under the media microscope, while large conservative scandals are just politics, a difference of opinion or a matter of she said he said. The media just cannot bring itself to call any major Republican figure a liar. To this day the three major broadcast networks have never fired anyone or apologized to the public for having war mongering far Right leaning military analysts on during the run up to the Iraq invasion selling the nation on war and for having them on during the occupation telling everyone how great things were.

Over the summer, we reported on an under-the-radar executive order issued by President Bush allowing him to freeze or seize the U.S-based assets of anyone, potentially including U.S. citizens, he deems to threaten “the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq” or who “undermin(e) efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq.”

The executive order was written so broadly as to alarm civil libertarians, who feared it was a back-door attempt at criminalizing the antiwar movement — which Bush could conceivably argue posed a threat to Iraq by seeking to end the U.S. military presence — or even unwitting donors to insurgent-linked charities. A spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, Molly Millerwise, told us not to worry: “Be assured that the individuals and entities we add to this list are in full faith acting in an aggressive, violent and reckless way in financing the insurgency,” she said.

Earlier this month,the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said: actually, maybe you should worry. It released a report (pdf) exploring “the contrast between the executive order’s broad language and its narrow aim” and questioning why the Treasury Department hasn’t released a list of eligible Iraq-related targets for the order.

Imagine during the peak of the Iraq war you grandmother get a solicitation from a charity asking for money for Iraqi orphans. There is a picture of a thin young kid in ragged clothing. She throws a ten spot into the envelope. Gosh, turns out that charity was directing half its money to some organization on some watch list. Suddenly grandma’s a terrorist sympathizer. Did the conservative experts on the constitution and what constitutes recessive presidential power make a big deal about Bush executive order. Of course not. Bush’s order could have landed some innocent person in jail. Obama’s executive order might…keep someone in school.

Conservative George Will openly rejects judicial restraint. This might be the single best reason to support Obama in 2012. Picture the next Supreme Court justice being appointed by Mittens – via recommendations from the nutbars at the Federalist Society, the Chamber of Commerce and the American Enterprise Institute.